Democratic (Party) Direction

Wow Taibbi wrote an article defending Morse a couple days ago and I was rmde. Now it turns out it was a frame-job?

I thought this was good:

https://www.vox.com/2020/8/17/21369922/democratic-convention-dnc-speeches-lineup

Low-trust voters are something of a blind spot for the Democratic Party, which is run and funded by a group of people — cosmopolitan, diverse, well-educated, economically secure — who see the world in positive terms and who feel their personal concerns are frequently catered to by cultural tastemakers.

...

Democrats aren’t going to suddenly stop being the party of college educated cosmopolitans, and Joe Biden couldn’t reasonably campaign as a revolutionary outsider. But conventions are about choices and branding, and it’s striking that Democrats are choosing to dedicate so little time to highlighting voices who could speak to any of the demographic groups on the margins of their coalition — the diverse group of mostly young, mostly working-class people who feel the political system has lost interest in them.

We knew former Republican Gov. Kasich would be speaking tonight at the Democratic National Convention. But now there are three more Republicans added to the program: former NJ Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former CA Gov. candidate Meg Whitman and former Rep. Susan Molinari. pic.twitter.com/4QE3A62EO0

— Dan Merica (@merica) August 17, 2020

lol

Weak

they should just set a day of the democratic convention aside for republican speakers

Message: Vote for Democrats because Republicans like them.

or literally build a bigger, larger tent and then have the GOP speakers address the webinar from that extra, added-on area of the tent

lmao at the Morse story

if you're gonna ratfuck someone, don't leave a big paper trail

Also does Meg Whitman even still identify as a Republican? I thought she abandoned the party after Trump's ascension.

not sure, but she did publicly support HRC so probably. She's also the CEO of Quibi and in general is surrounded by a distinct aura of "loser" but is also very rich

Eh, she was also the successful CEO of PayPal and successfully navigated HP into a deal with MicroFocus so it's not really the whole picture to think of her as a "loser" despite Quibi and the deeply misguided run for governor

sounds like the perfect spokesperson for democrats

I do think the wider message behind that lineup of speakers is "successful women hate the shit out of Donald Trump" which tbrr is not a bad message to put out there in a world that operates on actual meritocracy and equal opportunity (and yes, I know that's not the world we live in)

When does AOC make her 60-second speech? Are they letting her handle the Emergency Alert System test?

get the micro machines fast-talker to deliver AOC's speech

I suspect she knows what she's doing and will make her time count (inasmuch as that's possible).

how long was clint eastwood's lecture to the empty chair? that might make a good starting point. make obama sit in the chair and tell him what he has done wrong

The D convention could feature someone addressing a toupee - the empty hair speech.

not ALL American women

RT if you agree that American women deserve better than John Kasich. pic.twitter.com/grZ2DibN4F

— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) April 20, 2016

Eh, she was also the successful CEO of PayPal and successfully navigated HP into a deal with MicroFocus so it's not really the whole picture to think of her as a "loser" despite Quibi and the deeply misguided run for governor

― shout-out to his family (DJP), Monday, August 17, 2020 1:57 PM (two hours ago)

Admittedly I just couldn't resist the childish thrill of calling a billionaire a "loser," but her political track record is pretty hilarious! Not just her own campaign, but she helped with Romney's ('08), McCain's ('08), and Christie's ('16) runs.

Yeah well, there's a reason most business people should stay in business and not get into politics

Yeah well, there's a reason most business people should stay in business and not get into politics

― shout-out to his family (DJP)

because capitalism kills?

Stay in business is a strange euphemism for “be exiled to the bottom of the Marianas Trench”

because capitalism kills?

No, because they aren't good at politics.

Literally everything kills, it's not a useful rubric to demarcate by

I suspect third grade teachers are responsible for closer to zero deaths than any billionaire.

I thought this was good:

https://www.vox.com/2020/8/17/21369922/democratic-convention-dnc-speeches-lineup

― jaymc

i know yglesias' name and know that people here have opinions on him, don't know what they are

but i did think that was an interesting article

what it made me think of was the concept of delayed gratification, the way i was taught it, and the racial biases surrounding the way i was taught it

i guess i'm a little bit of an anomaly because by the criteria yglesias lays out in the article i ought to be a high-trust voter. i'm white, educated, professionally employed. and yet i am a low-trust voter. so when people try to dismiss my views by saying i'm unrepresentative, there's probably something to it? but i also see a lot of people around me who, ordinarily, one would expect to be high-trust voters engaging in speech and behavior that codes to me as low-trust. so there's a certain amount of uncertainty there.

it really does seem like the democrats' platform is based entirely on winning over voters who are ordinarily high-trust, and went over to trump, and i don't know, it might be me, but i just can't understand why someone who voted for trump in 2016 would vote for biden now. that's my challenge. maybe their data reveals vast seas of suburban moms who like and respect kasich but like yglesias points out their data perhaps has some flaws.

(i got like two paragraphs into the new york interview he clicked and had to turn it off, both the interviewer and the interviewee come off as particularly vile and reprehensible human beings and the fact that new york magazine found it really important to interview somebody who just got fired from his job for being a racist piece of shit about the election tells me a lot about their editorial focus.)

and so this kind of... is it wrong of me to find it funny? probably, i guess it's not a matter of right and wrong, but i find it hilarious the way liberals are clinging to the same fucking polls that told them clinton was going to whoop trump's ass. it's like, yeah, but how did the literary digest call the _1940_ presidential election?

(it didn't of course because the literary digest didn't exist in 1940, yet somehow all of the institutions that predicted a clinton win are still hanging around doing the same thing, putting out the same bullshit. i can only surmise that people were smarter in 1937 than they are now.)

anyway the moderates are right in that pandering to an electorate who are incapable of delayed gratification is somewhat unlikely to produce greater results than we have currently. the dnc's major mistake is in believing that there's anybody else left to pander to.

I think there are lots of middle of the road people that placed their bets on Trump, and then realized they'd made a horrible mistake.

I think there are lots of middle of the road people that placed their bets on Trump,

yes

and then realized they'd made a horrible mistake.

would believe this more if i'd heard more than, like, three of them in the past four years say "oh my god, what a horrible mistake i've made"

that's not what i'm hearing from trump voters. instead i hear "grumble grumble you just can't trust politicians"

four years from now they'll flatly deny to you that they ever voted for trump

these are the sorts voters biden is going for

To be fair he only needs like 80,000 of them to change the outcome of the election. it doesn’t seem like the easiest way to win votes when there are millions of people who didn’t vote last time, but it’s not a long shot.

"oh my god, what a horrible mistake i've made"

i feel like this is something i also highly desire, hearing people say this. but most people rarely do. i think i tend to hang out with people who are more apt to occasionally (or frequently, too much so) admit that they made a mistake, so i expect it more from everyone. but no...i think a century of Public Relations-influenced culture has resulted in a lot of people who think their best option is to never admit defeat. better to just press on and drop it, counting on everyone else's disinterest, forgiveness, or forgetfulness.

like, you think all those climate change alarmists are going to make me admit i was wrong about global cooling? well...we'll have to see. we will have to see...

*15 years pass*

it's 2020 now...and we will still have to see...we will just have to see...

There's a subreddit devoted to these people, called r/Trumpgret:

https://i.imgur.com/v2issJV.jpg

https://i.redd.it/ohuzlf9vubn01.png

https://i.redd.it/ji6y2h8qaqq31.png

https://i.redd.it/2t63fiwsbkw41.jpg

lol @ this one too:

https://i.redd.it/wdnjwyolb8s31.jpg

on the same tip, this twitter account is either soothing or maddening: https://twitter.com/trump_regrets?lang=en

ha this is reassurance porn

I think maybe I shld start my day with these for the next few months

I mean it’s just a bunch of IRANIAN BOTS but fantasy is healthy

reassurance porn is a great term for it

See also:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/miles-taylor-video-donald-trump-dhs-biden-2020-election-border-a9675001.html

so is AOC still just getting a minute?

did they have a target audience in mind for this convention opening video, or are we just supposed to let it wash over us without feeling any emotion like i am?

Isn't that the general idea? I've never known anybody of any age who watches conventions.

I'm watching Murder, She Wrote, in which Jessica Fletcher delivered a spectacular monologue.

To be fair he only needs like 80,000 of them to change the outcome of the election. it doesn’t seem like the easiest way to win votes when there are millions of people who didn’t vote last time, but it’s not a long shot.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek)

this is a... generous intepretation of the facts, given that there are certain confounding variables here

for instance, the entirety of the last four fucking years

How do exactly?

How *so

well, for instance, i voted for hillary clinton in 2016 in indiana. in the intervening four years i have moved to oregon and i plan on abstaining from voting for president in 2020.

that's one data point. how many people were in america in 2016? how many of them voted, and who did they vote for? how many of them have died? how many people became eligible to vote between 2016 and 2020?

now, i guess you can discard a lot of that data, because fortunately for pollsters votes in most states don't actually count towards determining the outcome of an election. indiana wasn't a decisive state in 2016, oregon isn't going to be a decisive state in 2020. so really, you only have to determine all of this individual data in the so-called "swing states". assuming you can correctly predict what those states will be.

how does one generalize this data into predicting an election? what tools do we have to do this? what models do we have to do this? ok, everybody predicted strongly that clinton would win in 2016, and everybody was wrong. do we know why everybody was wrong? do we know how we can correct for those errors? (i believe the answer to this one is "no".)

how do we factor in the structural changes that have occurred in america since 2016? how do we factor in the effects of the incumbent openly and blatantly trying to rig the election on turnout? how do we factor in the knowledge that election results in at least one state have been hacked, and that no safeguards have been put in place to prevent them from being hacked again?

there are a lot of things that are uncertain right now. one of the few things that's not uncertain: biden can't "change the outcome of the election", because he's not running in the 2016 election, because it is not in fact 2016, although he doesn't really appear to have any knowledge or understanding of this.

I wouldn't overthink it. There is clearly a national majority of voting Americans who are more liberal than conservative. That majority is not perfectly distributed and its concentration in certain places puts it at a disadvantage in a system that gives weight to real estate as well as population. Still, the gaps aren't as vast as they seem. I live in a massively red state, but you actually only have to flip one vote in 10 to make it a draw. My state will certainly stay red this year, but there are lots of states that are totally winnable to change the 2016 result.

I know that anxiety is not a voluntary state, but the best reason I know not to overthink the possible results of a national election which is months away is that such thinking will not alter those results. I would suggest that, rather than worrying about how the variables and unknowns will eventually sift down, it makes more sense to project your situation under each result (there are only two which are necessary to consider as likely) and try to imagine your own best course of action under each result.

This is not to say imagining what to do would be simple or easy, but it would return the problem to a dimension where your thoughts and desires matter to the outcome, whereas your personal desires cannot affect how 180,000,000 people will vote in roughly 55 different jurisdictions.

this is an oversimplification, but I look at it like this: the states that went for HRC are probably not swinging over to Trump in November. The 2016 election was won by extremely thin margins in a small number of swing states. An increase in Democratic turnout plus some defections from those MOR voters would be enough to turn those decisive states over to Biden. Biden is currently polling ahead in a number of states beyond those 2016 swing states.

The electoral college is essentially gerrymandering writ large. It gives Republicans a natural advantage, but it rests upon extremely thin margins, and falls apart in the face of enthusiasm, even negative enthusiasm.

it makes more sense to project your situation under each result (there are only two which are necessary to consider as likely) and try to imagine your own best course of action under each result.

this makes sense to me. it's an interesting question, the idea of believing in something and believing that your actions make a significant difference on the the outcome. it's difficult because yes, your actions do make a difference, at some multiple of an infinitesimal scale. what you think and do and act out publicly does have a small effect. but on the whole, unless you're some named figure in the media, your actions don't amount to much. which means it does just come down to your reaction (possibly a binary) to the results, rather than what you did to change the results